Thanks for the thoughtful response :)

I meant “human flourishing” as a shorthand for the list of things I listed, as in “things that tend to make individual humans feel fulfilled” not the expansion and thriving of humans as a species.

But wouldn’t “human fluorishing” be a lot more in line with reaching the “states and behaviors that it was evolutionarily beneficial for our ancestors to be in” as you so elloquently explained before?

I feel that most (all?) of the things you listed are only good because they serve a purpose towards that goal. We like being safe/healthy because if we didn’t we would risk dying (the opposite of thriving), we like working in groups & helping / getting approval from each other because a community is stronger together (higher chances of survival), etc.

I feel those causes of happiness you list are also consequence of natural selection pushing our species to thrive & flourish. There’s no compelling reason to have them as goals by themselves either. In fact, seeking these things might also prove just as pathological as seeking happiness. It’s not always good to desperatelly seek approval from peers regardless of the consequences, for example. And sometimes, obsessing over those goals can cause frustration/stress.

For one thing those “utopias” didn’t meet all of the rats’ needs - they had unlimited food and safety from outside threats but they didn’t have unlimited space

True, though space is never really unlimited, not even the Universe is infinite (in Star Trek they simply haven’t reached the limit of their expansion… but they are in a gigantic enclosed rat box that ultimatelly has to reach a tipping point, even if it takes millenia).

My point wasn’t that an utopia can’t work for a period of time, but that it’s unsustainable in the long term to keep up with the constant growth that thirst for happiness pushes all living beings towards. At the beginning, the space the rats were given was more than enough, and the utopia worked just fine for several generations.

I’m also not convinced such behavioral sinks apply to humans, or at least apply to them as completely as they did to those rats. Some unique features we have that seem relevant here include our level of sociality, playfulness and adaptability.

I’d argue humans are already full of deviant behavior, just like those rats. Our sociality, playfulness and adaptability is ripe with unnatural deviations.

Videogames, art, entertainment, sports, spending the time in the internet, random hobbies, porn… I’d argue all those are behavioral anomalies. They might be connected deep inside to a natural need, but it’s under so many levels of abstraction that the gratification we feel from those stimuli has been long dettached from the original natural purpose that made us enjoy those things. Those behaviors are just a more complex version of how Pavlov dogs salivate at the ringing of a bell. They come with more steps, but they are not so different from the distopic “happy pill”.

We might not be starving for space, but we do have limits in resources, and the capitalistic thirst for constant “economic growth” that provides so much happiness to many is not sustainable, in the same way as the population growth wasn’t sustainable for the rats.

During the experiments some rats started behaving more like humans. They lost interest in sex and didn’t get into fights, some preferred to avoid socializing, some just slept, ate and groomed (Calhoun called them “the beautiful ones”).

I feel that the problem in the end is not so much in “instant gratification” vs “naturally experiencing the things that lead to that gratification” but in “instincts” vs “logic”.

Happiness, dopamines and such, are just how nature pushes us to have a goal to seek. If we were pure creatures of cold logic (like say… Vulkans, to keep with the trekkie references) we would never have a need for happiness, we would be calm, at peace… not exactly happy, but not unhappy either. It would be a relatively healthy state, never feeling stressed.

The problem is that we do need animal instincts to have a purpose. There would be no reason for humanity to do anything without our reptilian brain giving us a motivation. There’s no logical reason to not just let ourselves “die”. No reason to have sex (I guess that’s why Vulkans become irrational on mating season). It’s not like the existence of humans makes the world “better” in any objective absolutist way. The only reason we see our life (and that of others) as a good thing is because we are programmed to see it as such. But the planet, the universe, they don’t care… they’ll continue “happily” existing after humanity is extinct. Humans are a lot less significant in the grand scheme of things than we think we are.

I think we just need to learn to control our emotions. Dopamine is overrated. And I bet we would just build tolerance against it if we were constantly receiving it.